Friday, 2 October 2009

I have been reading some literature about institutional (digital) repositories. I am interested in the human and social issues surrounding their development and implementation as well as their embedding. I think this literature is very relevant to BRII as it reports experiences in similar implementations (not necessarily technically but conceptually) in similar kinds of institutions.

Technically speaking BRII is not building a digital repository but a Research Information Infrastructure (so a bit much broader in scope.) However the issues, technical and non-technical, surrounding implementation of institutional (digital) repositories apply. The reasons are:

BRII has an institutional scope and it is situated within an academic context. It aims to collect information about research in all academic areas and its target audience is everyone within the University who carries out research-related activities.

BRII deals with Research Activity Data: information about research. So, not information used and generated by research (as in datasets and publications) but descriptions of research (people and activities.) This kind of information is essential to facilitate scholarly communication.

BRII core users are Researchers and Faculty: as content contributors of research descriptions and as users of the information deposited in the infrastructure.

Being now in the "development stage" of the project we are starting to think on how to make our products more relevant to our core users, so they understand them and use them. Of course to make users understand the Research Information Infrastructure we first need to understand our users. Our work in BRII should not be techocentric only but should expand to reaching out to our users, speaking their own language and observing them in their own working spaces. This can be a very difficult task as we are dealing with heterogeneous groups of academics and administrators, each one with different needs and perspectives (as per their research culture.)

Understanding our users is a crucial first step to achieving acceptance and adoption of the RII.

Research in the area of Institutional Repositories field has reported some issues concerning this.

In a study of implementation of an Institutional Repository (IR) at the University of Rochester, Foster and Gibbons (2005) report a "misalignment between the benefits and services of an IR with the actual needs and desires of faculty." They state that the benefits of Institutional Repositories are attractive only to the institutions which host the repositories. This is because Institutions (including Librarians and IT developers) see IRs as a way to facilitate access, reduce costs and improve efficiencies at collecting and managing information that is produced in the Institution. On the other hand academics see themselves as belonging to research communities (not institutions) and are not concerned about the proccesses of managing all that data they produce. This is, perhaps, because they see the problem as affecting others and not themselves. (Colbertt, 2009)

At the centre of this all is the Scholarly Communication crisis. In 2002 the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) (part of the association of Research Libraries (ARL)) stated that Institutional Repositories could help combat dissatisfactoin with the "monopolistic effects of the traditional and still pervasive journal publishing system" (Crow (2002) quoted in Maness et al (2008)). Rieger (2008) states that to combat this crisis, academic institutions aim at "reducing costs of producing and acquiring publications and gaining control of processes from commercial publishers." Seen from this angle, institutional repositories are good and sensible solutions. Attention therefore is devoted to technical efficiencies and control of the information produced within the institution. A consequence of this is a bias towards computer and librarian approaches to developing IRs, which neglect perspectives from relevant groups’ interests.

From BRIIs Stakeholder analysis we have learned that technical efficiencies, metadata, repositories are terms which are meaningless to academics. This concurs with Foster and Gibbons (2005) view. Seen from this technocentric perspective IRs do not provide benefits to academics. In addition having institutional labels suggests researchers that the IRs will support the needs of the institution and not their own individual needs. Academics are indeed a different crowd:

Academics think in terms of reading, researching, writing and disseminating.

Academics have strong ties with the people interested in their own field of research, or with whom they are interested to collaborate. Their geographical location is not important to them.

Academics are interested in a relatively small subset of research information, that one of their own research field. They have acquired skills to search for and use that information for their own work.

BRII Stakeholder Analysis (Loureiro-Koechlin, 2009)

On the other hand implementers of repositories (IT and library practitioners) possess an institutional perspective, they are interested in developing new forms of scholarly communication, control costs and improve data manipulation.

An example of institutional perspective is the mapping of people and information under the umbrella of their institutions and departments. This is an obvious mismatch as researchers see themselves as belonging to their research communities. Other issues connected to the particular ways in which research is carried out (technical and ethical) also accentuate these differences. One example of this is the differences of methodologies and nature of data collected by natural scientists and social scientists. Carusi and Jirotka (2009) report ethical issues of archiving qualitative data in a digital format, such us consent, anonymity and privacy…They state that reusing research data for other purposes will go against research participants wishes and therefore researchers ideals.

Misalignments like the above are reasons why academics do not feel institutional repositories are relevant to their work. Therefore as Foster and Gibbons (2005) report there is a need to get to know researchers in their own space so we can develop tools which are useful to them as well as to the institution. This improves the chances of IRs to being accepted and adopted by their users.

One example is Maness et al's (2008) study on needs and goals of institutional repository. It reports results which contradicted initial assumptions by IR designers and decision makers. While designers and decision makers assumed users wanted an open-access archive for research outputs, the study found out that in reality users wanted a network to share learning and teaching materials, where collaborators could be identified and where their research could be promoted to institutional colleagues.

1 comment:

Cecilia, It's helpful to bring a user perspective to IRs, so I welcome your investigation initiated with this blog and look forward to your further reflections from your project perspective. You highlighted an important issue affecting IRs, but I'm not sure you realised this. You refer to 'misalignments' between academics and IRs, noting that "academics think in terms of reading, researching, writing and disseminating." Just above this you state very clearly that : "At the centre of this all is the Scholarly Communication crisis." References are given. This is actually a source of the misalignment you have identified. Instead, open access is at the centre for the types of repository you are considering, i.e. this is aligned with the researcher's interest in dissemination. The mistake, widely perpetrated, is to confuse this with the library crisis, but researcher's just don't get it. Replace the 'crisis' with open access, and IRs have a better chance of success.

About this Blog

Cecilia Loureiro-Koechlin

I am the BRII Project Analyst and responsible for this blog. I work at the Systems and e-Research Service at the Bodleian Libraries - Oxford University. E Cecilia.Loureiro-Koechlin@bodleian.ox.ac.uk, T +44 (0) 1865 280028, Contact address: Osney One, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0EW

Project Website

Our Goal

Building the Research Information Infrastructure (BRII) aims to support the efficient sharing of Research Activity Data (RAD) captured from a wide range of sources. BRII develops an infrastructure that harvests and archives RAD, and Web services which disseminate and reuse this kind of data by using a lightweight solution based on semantic web technologies. Phases of the project include: a stakeholder analysis to collect views from interested parties (e.g., academics and administrators); an iterative development process which uses information collected in the analysis phase; and an embedding and sustainability phase where user acceptance is assessed and strategies to support the expansion of the information research infrastructure are designed. Additional outputs of the BRII include: an application programming interface (API) for harvesting and querying data; a collection of ontologies and taxonomies used to organise and classify data; a themed Web site; and the Oxford Blue Pages displaying RAD in creative ways. By facilitating access to RAD, BRII expects to improve the research visibility of the institution and its research impact, as well as boost collaboration.

Rumsey, S. (2010) BRII registry & other outputs A description of the pilot Research Activity Data Registry functionality, services and other outputs that will be developed by the project end (March 2010) and suggestions for further work.

Adding a researcher profile. Video clip demonstrating how to search for a researcher profile in the ORA registry and then embed this in a content managed website.

Loureiro-Koechlin C. (2009) Selling an abstract concept to a practical audience (presented at the Modular e-Administration of Teaching (MEAoT) Assembly, Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET), University of Cambridge, 10 December 2009.)